Dov Slansky:
Sign up more intakes, work your cases faster, and settle them for more money.
Chris Dreyer:
Technology can help create better processes, more accurate analytics, and simplify your operations.
Dov Slansky:
We're focusing and making sure that our firms are able to stay ahead of the curve.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. We bring the guidance you need to elevate your practice. We've curated a lineup of industry-leading vendors to share their wisdom. Each episode is packed with tangible takeaways and actionable advice, so you leave with a brand new edition to your toolkit every Tuesday. Whether you're a seasoned law firm owner looking to stay ahead of the game or a budding attorney just starting your journey, this is your go-to resource for innovation and growth. So grab a paper and pen and take notes. Let's go.
Running a law firm on one management platform can come with serious advantages, increased efficiencies, improved communication, better data management, and streamlined workflows. From initial lead contact to distribution of funds, Litify is a one-stop platform. I caught up with their VP of Strategy and Innovation, Dov Slansky. We discussed how Litify helps you get granular with lead attribution and how measuring utilization rates can help you identify your top players. We dig into practical ways to increase efficiency through artificial intelligence. Here's Dov Slansky, VP of Strategy and Innovation at Litify.
Dov Slansky:
People usually refer to me as a recovering attorney. My response is the recovery is not going so well, because I do this for a living, which is sell SaaS software to law firms and corporate legal departments. But yeah, I got my career started as an attorney, did a bunch of personal injury employment, mass torte work for a number of years, had an opportunity to do some technology work. Myself and a couple other people were working for a large personal injury law firm at the time, and we started doing some technology work and realized that there's an opportunity here - this is back in 2015 or so - realized we had an opportunity to turn it into a real business. Left the firm with their blessing, set up Litify, and it's been a wild seven-year ride ever since then. Tackling challenges of software and technology for law firms is pretty unique. Now, my background comes in handy, obviously. It's been great, it's been a lot of fun, we've had a lot of success.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, a little PI firm, a little one, Morgan & Morgan. Yeah. So you have the perfect, you can see kind of both sides, and I've seen this even in the legal space. You have someone that works on the insurance defense side, and then they go to be on the other side for the plaintiffs.
Dov Slansky:
Yeah, depending who you ask, they like to say that they're on the good side now, and somehow it's both sides.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. We spoke with Terry Dohrmann, co-founder and CRO of Litify, on Episode 13, so that was way back. And a lot of things, you guys improved the product. Can you give me the elevator pitch? What is Litify? Who's it for?
Dov Slansky:
Litify is designed to be a platform, right? We like to call ourselves a legal operating system, which is it's one place for your entire legal business to run. So if you're a personal injury law firm, everything for the moment, a prospect at intake contacts you, work up the intake, sign them up to the firm, work through the entire case to settlement, disperse funds, and have reports [inaudible 00:03:14] to go across the entire business.
On the defense side, pretty similar, but you're going to be billing for your time, so you can handle all of your time and billing needs, all of your accounting, everything directly inside of the platform. So again, that single pane of glass, that one-stop shop to do everything that your firm needs and with great integrations, right? We're built on top of the Salesforce platform. So that means that not only did we build it for you, but we also built in hooks and connections to thousands of other applications that you can use to extend your usage of Litify. So whether it's things like E-signature, SMS, all the way up to medical record retrieval, court filings, deadlines, et cetera, all happening in one place.
Chris Dreyer:
Who's this for? Is it for the solo practitioner with a couple staff working out of Google Sheets and Excel? At what size do you think it's beneficial, because there is some added costs to the software, and at what size would you recommend maybe a firm looking at an end solution like Litify?
Dov Slansky:
Yeah, it's a really good question and one we get all the time. I was at a conference a little while ago when someone posed the question a little bit differently. They asked when does your firm need an admin? And everybody said, well, until you have 50 people, you don't need an admin. I said, well, it seems kind of arbitrary, right? You might need an admin when you have five people. It really depends on how you want to behave at your firm. So we like to say Litify is for, obviously, it's for large firms, that's right off the bat. If you're a large law firm, 50, 60, 100-plus people at the firm, Litify is going to be the number one fit for you.
If you're not, because there's a lot of firms that are 10, 20 people at the firm. If you are of a growth mindset, Litify is going to be something you want to use, because you're going to be able to get into it. And yeah, there's added costs, but you're going to get into it and you're going to be there and growing on it for the next five, 10 years with your firm. Not solo practitioners so much, right? There's plenty of software out there that is really, really good for what they do, keep the firm running. Typically, when you're a solo, you're not looking to become a 50-person firm. If you are, great. Litify still might be a little early for you at that point.
If you're 10, 20 people and looking to grow, looking to do more, Litify is going to be a great place to get yourself started and grow into it. And if you are already one of the larger firms in the space, like I mentioned, 50 people, 100 people, 200, 300, 400 people, Litify is going to be able to encompass your entire business in ways that other software just can't quite get there.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And I want to drill into the nomenclature of Litify and really define this, because I've struggled with this being on the non-legal side. In my space, we have a CRM, your pipe drives your HubSpots, and then you have project management tools that manage the client work. And you're saying this is end to end, this is sales and case management, all end to end. Is that the main differentiator, as opposed to like a lead docket that just does the front end, and maybe does the front end really well on leads, and doesn't do the case management? Is that one of the main differences of the tool?
Dov Slansky:
For a personal injury from a political and a plaintiff firm, right, the end-to-end nature is going to be key. There's a lot of tools out there, you mentioned them. Who else? Captora, for example. I know they have a matter management offering now, but they came up in this space as one of the bigger players in the intake space. Good tools, good tools, but at some point you have to go someplace else. The challenge of transitioning a tool, there's a lot of challenges. One is there's a simple data challenge, so now my data's in one and I have to move some of it over. Do I move all of it? Do I move some of it? Is it manual? Is it automatic? My reports start to be a little bit lacking in that steering, because not every data point moves over.
And then there's just the human nature of it, using two pieces of software is just not as good as using one, even if you have different departments. If you have an intake department, it might be in one, and your lawyers might be in the other one, there's a lot of crossover. And there probably should be more crossover and I think you would find, if you had them in one tool. So yeah, I would say that Litify is the, let's call them nominally the CRM. So if you want to use sales terminology like your HubSpots and your pipe drives, again, we're on Salesforce, so throw Salesforce into that mix. We're the CRM.
We're also the case management, the matter management tool. So once you are done, well, you're never done marketing, but once you've captured that particular client, let's say, you've signed that client up, the intake phase, that prospect phase, is over. The fact that you can continue working on that case in the same piece of software all the way to the resolution gives you a really unique ability to do that full cycle 360 ROI. You have your marketing dollars, your intake, your case management, your actual fees, all the way through disbursement. It is really, really unique from an analytic perspective.
Chris Dreyer:
So let's take this, let's break this up just a little bit, and let's talk profit. Okay. On the front end, the lead side and the intake side, where does the tool shine? Do you have lead scoring that identifies those top 5% cases? Does it help with the attribution side? Let's start on the front end, from a profitability perspective. How does it compliment profitability?
Dov Slansky:
Attribution is incredibly strong. Again, we're on Salesforce, so we can connect to any of your marketing tools that are out there. So think of all of your web forms, instantly push them to Litify. Think of all of your social ads. So now you're going to be doing marketing with your Facebook lead ads, your TikTok ads. They all push directly into Litify, so you can have really, really strong attribution. I'll add in, we can also connect to phones, and that has often been the black hole, right, of marketing dollars, which is especially if you're using a branded number, how do you actually know where those calls came from?
We can connect to things like Invoca or CallRail, to be able to get actual dynamic phone number content inside. We can also directly connect to the phone system that you're using, if you're using a VoIP system, to be able to grab not just attribution data, but call data, who answered the call, how long they were on the call, what number they actually called. We can grab that directly from the phone system by connecting it to Litify. So attribution is really, really key, and we have some great reports and dashboards that will highlight your attribution. So you know not only where you're spending your money, which you should know anyway, but why you're spending your money there. So the attribution part is key.
Chris Dreyer:
I've worked with firms that kind of, back in the day, Needles was the platform. And their attribution, when we talked about attribution, was here's the digital lead. Are we getting granular? Are we talking about here's your Google Maps leads, here's your Facebook leads? How granular are we getting, or is it as granular as you want?
Dov Slansky:
It's as granular as you want. Now, we'll have firms that are actually going to parse out the UTM parameters from the links that they get.
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, wow.
Dov Slansky:
And be able to really, really get not just that you came off my website, my digital lead, but what form or what page you converted from. We can get really, really deep. Again, some of it is native to Litify's, because of our Salesforce backend, some of it is through connecting to really what are the best in class marketing tools. So you're thinking of connecting to the Pardots and the marketing Clouds and the HubSpots and the MailChimps of the world, more, and did the first ones that came to mind, obviously, but some of that is connecting to there and really, really, getting, again, not every firm wants to get to that level, but for the ones who do, they can get as granular as they want to, really, really understand and fine tune their marketing.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's shift over to service side. Let's talk about profit on the service side. One of the things that a lot of companies have to do separate is they'll do time tracking, and we're measuring utilization rates. So when your team is in there, does the whole company work out of this syncing to email and calendars, and they just work out Litify, and it auto time tracks? And how do you look at utilization rates to see if, say, Bobby's not putting in the hours and Bobby needs to go, or he's not as profitable.
Dov Slansky:
Sorry, Bobby.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about profitability on the service side. How does Litify help on the service side?
Dov Slansky:
For sure. First off, sorry Bobby, it's been good. So yeah, a couple of points in there. Does the whole firm work out of it? In some respects, right? We're not going to replace your email, we're not going to replace your calendar. We do have the ability to sync with your calendar so you can see it in both places. I tell people all the time, I'm going to be the last person that goes to an attorney and tells them not to use Outlook for calendaring, right? You can use Outlook for calendaring, it'll show up in Litify. If you prefer to use Litify, it'll show up in Outlook. It's a bi-directional sync. We'll make the information available to you, but we're not going to rip the tool away that you use.
Same with email. You can send an email from Litify, just like you could send it from Outlook, and if you send it in either place, you'll see it in either place. Now, we have plugins for Outlook that let you save emails to the matter, and we'll do the full automatic thread savings, so save one, all the replies, will automatically get filed in. So we're not out to take the tools away, we're out to make them better. So nominally, will you work from Litify? Yeah, some more, some less, but you're going to work there because that's going to be the home for all your information.
When it comes to time tracking you're talking about, I love the fact that you keyed on utilization, because we know we're hearing it more, but still, I think it's an underused stat when firms are looking at what they're actually doing. When we're looking at time tracking inside the software, so yeah, your old-fashioned manual timekeeping is still there. Whether you want to run a timer or just manually input your time, it's still there. Task and activity codes, full narrative support, it's all inside there.
I would say we added two things to it, which are maybe not unique, but I think we execute on them really, really well. One is automated timekeeping, not in the sense that it's tracking your clicks into your computer. There are tools out there that do that, some better, some worse. We prefer to look at it based on the actions you're taking. Can we insert a time entry based on them? So if you sent an email, can we automatically bill a 0.1, because that's what you're going to bill for it. If you generated a document with our software, can we bill a 0.1 for you, because again, that's what you're going to bill for when you create a new letter for someone.
So are there actions actually that you can take that we can automatically bill your time and do it properly, so that you know your task connectivity codes are clean, your narrative is not going to get flagged for nonpayment. You know that it's going to go in clean, so when you hit a pre-bill at the end of the month, you simply don't have to worry about those time entries. That's one area where we're going to add a tonne of automation and capture.
The other is going to be around the concept of conforming to the guidelines that you've been given as a firm. So we added in a feature where you can actually build those guidelines into the software. So when you want to talk about billing for time, you're no longer, again, having to clean it up at the point of entry. We're going to check against the guidelines and make sure that your work is correct at the point of entry. So now you know it's going in right. So now when you want to look at utilization, you know that the time is in there correctly. Now you have to understand, well, how does that look as a function of the person's overall performance? That's where the analytics, the dashboards that we can run are going to be super helpful.
We'll put them up on the attorney's homepage so that they actually can track for themselves where they are, because it's so much easier to understand what you're doing when the information is available to you. When you don't have to think about what you did, and it's available for you, you can see it for good, you're keeping your hours up to date, for bad, you've fallen behind, but better that you know about it yourself before you get the knock on the door that says, hey, Bobby, not working out so well. So we'll put the utilization in front of the attorneys front and centre all the time. We'll also run those dashboards at that level for the managers, the executives, to be able to look at it as a department, as a practice area, to say, okay, look, we know what we want to be billing. Where are we strong? Where are we weak? Is it by practice area? Is it by attorney? Where can we actually see those hours coming in? Where are we leaving them on the table?
Chris Dreyer:
Artificial intelligence or AI can be leveraged to increase time and cost efficiencies at your firm. Before we dive into how, let's get clear on a few concepts. There are two basic forms of AI. First, there is traditional AI, that's logic based and uses predetermined rules to solve specific problems. The rules and logic are created by human experts. This looks like a series of if-then statements and usually presents a complex decision tree to arrive at an answer. You might not hear about this AI on the news, but it is part of your life. Traditional AI or classic AI powers web search engines like Google Search, YouTube, and Netflix.
And then there's AI that you probably hear about on a daily basis. That's generative AI, think Chat GPT. Generative AI learns from large data sets that can generate new data. What it creates is not confined to predetermined rules or templates. It can be used to generate videos and images, enhance or augment data sets, and create long form text. AI can be used to enhance the existing human capabilities at your firm. Dov explains how.
Dov Slansky:
We have a group here at Litify that is focused solely on some next-gen AI capabilities and what they can do with it. Taking a look at things like there are, for example, there are chatbots out there, there's a bunch of them. There's Intaker, there's Gideon, there's a bunch of them, Apex Gen has one. You've used them in every industry, if you've tried to chat with someone, some better, some worse, but it's mostly taking you along the script. There's pre-canned answers, you've got to choose one. It doesn't fit so well in legal, because it's very rarely a straight line to intake, but it used to be you'd have to hire someone and train them.
Now, some of our tools are really easy. We can take some firm's training, we've seen stats where we've taken some firm's intake training from four weeks down to one, where we can cut that by 75% because we can really build in those pathing, those tree branching questionnaires into the systems that you have to have less, we'll call it less skill, and it's a little pejorative and unintentionally, but we'll call it a little less skill at that front to walk them through.
But now thinking about the scenario of you could take a smart piece of software, and you can tell it Chat GPT, I need you to be a empathetic intake agent at a law firm, and I need you to capture the following subset of information, it's going to behave like a person. It's going to ask questions, it's going to give you responses, and we've been training some of these to really put that at the forefront. Is it going to replace people? I firmly believe no is the truth, not in any timeframe that I can see at least, but it is going to, I think, change the way that after-hours calls are taken, that online chats are taken. I think we can do a tremendous amount of work to make that not just better for the law firms, because that's easy, but better for the clients.
When you come to a website, no one likes going through chat, because you don't feel like someone's helping you. But if you can actually go through it, even though you know it's a computer on the other end, let's be clear, I don't think anybody is going to mistake it for a person, nor should they. If it's asking you the questions in the right way, if it's trying to understand and not badgering you, just because the script says to keep asking this one, it makes it a better process. So we have a group that's looking at things like that, and looking at things like documents.
How can we ingest the contents of a document and give you back relevant points on it, whether it's a summary of it on a court filing, pulling out specific dates. If it's medical records, can we pull out certain things from there, again, making sure that we're careful on HIPAA and PII, so scrubbing those documents, but still pulling out relevant information that ordinarily you would maybe send offshore or to a nursing group to be able to do that. Can we do that with software? You'd be shocked. These things are really, really good at finding that information. So we have a group that's looking at those next-gen things, in terms of what we can release in the near future to augment, as you said, the work that people are doing.
We then have the normal AI tools. I don't know the right word for that now, but the logic-based ones, like you said, I think is a good one. There's a big toolkit out there. Salesforce has a great toolkit that we dip into, their Einstein suite of tools. So whether it's things like next best action, which is, hey, you input the following data, here's what you should do next, and giving it to you in a human readable, like literally here is your next best action to take. We use that in our routing tools, for example. So for our insurance defence firms, if they're going to start, or our insurance companies, I should say, if they're going to route claims to outside counsel, how do they know which firm to route it to? So we can tell them, hey, based on the data, here's where you should route it to, or here's the next best action to take in a litigation. There's a bunch of tools that we dip into on the logic side to be able to afford that ability to our firms to just, I would say, make better decisions faster.
Chris Dreyer:
Such a fantastic answer, and yeah, even on the intake side, we've seen the stuff with Engage and what they're doing and selling the leads, it's just crazy. That's a whole different story, but I feel like some of those, it can be rigid, of course. We'll see what happens, and I would imagine that, yeah, you would know it's AI, because you'd probably have a disclaimer at the top, just in case they said something a little crazy.
Dov Slansky:
I actually think people want to know it's AI, is my point. I think people actually, they don't want to sort of be, I don't want to say lied to, they're not looking to be fooled, because if you do that and it trips up, it makes it even worse. I think people are perfectly okay talking to a computer, as long as they're getting the result that they want, which is not to be bothered or badgered by annoying questions or irrelevant questions, but give me the information I want and get me the answer I need. And if the answer is a person, get me to a person. If the answer is an answer, get me to the answer. And if you're doing that, I don't think people have a problem talking to a computer.
I think where the breakdown is, is where they're either not getting the information, so they just hammer zero on the keypad to get me to a person, or where they think it's a person for a minute, and then it sort of breaks down, and then they get super frustrated like, oh, man, I can't believe I just got caught in this loop.
Chris Dreyer:
Yep, that sounds like me with the 00000. Operator. Operator. Representative. I'd always been curious on the end to end side, because I see the lead dockets on the front end or the case management side on the other, and this bringing it all together lends itself to a lot of transparency. Of course, being tied in with Salesforce and all their technology advantages, extreme advantages to Litify. What's next for Litify, and how can our audience get in touch with you?
Dov Slansky:
dov@litify.com is my email address, pretty simple. You can find us at litify.com, obviously. Fill out any of our forms there, our team will get back to you. On the plaintiff side of the house, we are actually hosting our annual event, we call it LitiQuest, that's taking place in October. You'll find more information on our website. It brings together a couple hundred of the largest firms really across the country every year. It'll be in Austin, Texas, this year. It's kind of a new venue for us, I'm excited for it. Nothing like going from New York to Austin in October, so I'm excited for that.
What's next? Just more, honestly, so in all of our verticals. On the plaintiff side, like I mentioned, we're doing a lot of work on how to make our firms more efficient. How do we get you to the bottom faster, and how do we get, again, I keep going back to that we've always been as a business. We want to get you to be able to sign up more intakes, work your cases faster and settle them for more money. It sounds great, it sounds like a pipe dream, it's not. The technology can help when you have better process, when you have better analytics. Again, we're still seeing everyday firms that have good process and good software, they just don't have the analytics. They're spending days and days in Excel, they're porting data over. And not that [inaudible 00:22:30] are bad tools, they're great tools, but they're not real time. They're sending data there, they're crunching it there, they're feeding it back. The analytics that we can provide, the automation that we can give, that's really where we're focusing and making sure that our firms are able to stay ahead of the curve.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Dov for sharing us with them today. Let's recap. Know where your leads are coming from. You heard me say it before, attribution can be murky. When attribution is murky, it's hard to really know which of your marketing efforts are being most effective. To better understand your marketing and where you should be adjusting your spend, look for tools that allow you to track on a more granular level.
Dov Slansky:
We'll have firms that are actually going to parse out the UTM parameters from the links that they get, and be able to really, really get not just that you came off my website, right, my digital lead, but what form or what page you converted from. Not every firm wants to get to that level, but for the ones who do, they can get as granular as they want, to really, really understand and fine tune their marketing.
Chris Dreyer:
Employee utilization is the key to unlocking your firm's potential. It functions as a gauge of billing efficiency and exerts a massive impact on the functioning of your firm, so it's important to accurately and efficiently measure the utilization rate at your firm.
Dov Slansky:
So are there actions, actually, that you can take, that we can automatically bill your time and do it properly, so that you know your task connectivity codes are clean, your narrative is not going to get flagged for nonpayment. You know that it's going to go in clean, so when you hit a pre-bill at the end of the month, you simply don't have to worry about those time entries. That's one area where we're going to add a tonne of automation and capture.
Chris Dreyer:
AI might not be replacing humans anytime soon, but leveraging AI can help increase the efficiency of your firm.
Dov Slansky:
You could take a smart piece of software, and you can tell it, Chat GPT, I need you to be an empathetic intake agent at a law firm, and I need you to capture the following subset of information. It's going to behave like a person. It's going to ask questions, it's going to give you responses, but it is going to, I think, change the way that after-hours calls are taken, that online chats are taken. I think we can do a tremendous amount of work to make that not just better for the law firms, because that's easy, but better for the clients.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, everybody, you've got the tools, and thanks to Dov for dropping all that knowledge with us. To learn more about Litify, head on over to the show notes. While you're there, leave me a five star review. I'll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io.
